Wednesday, July 16, 2008

DEATH IN TRAIN

Train arrived at the station on time. It came late only on few occasion, since I started my journey to my working place. Almost all people from kannur, Tellicherry and Vatakara, who are working in Calicut city and its suburbs heavily depends on this train. It starts its journey four O’clock in the morning and end at six O’ clock in the evening. It covers almost all districts in Kerala. We usually travel in second compartment from engine. While considering other compartments it has not much rush. Besides this, this compartment stops out of the platform and we can avoid rush from the next station. Recently other passengers came to know this secret and started traveling in this compartment.

“Come fast, there is seat”. My friend said. The train was about to stop. I wondered. Is there seat? I rushed in to the compartment, but couldn’t reach that place. Then how a seat vacant there, I thought. “A man’s dead body is there”, a passenger said. “Come, let us see who is that” my friend said. We reached there in between the passengers who were standing. The compartment was filled with passengers as usual, only that seat was empty except that old man’s body. The half part of the body was lying on seat and the rest was on the floor. There was no shirt on the body; a piece of cloth covered his nakedness. He was a wandering man. No one in the compartment was listening; all were engaged in their activities.

Death is certain, when it happens. The distance between life and death is how much? All are uncertain. All people know all are to die, but never think of their own death. Passengers around the body were not bothered about the old man’s death, because he was a stranger and also a nomad. But bother, if it happens to somebody who is very close.He might be roaming for so many years, he might be a son, or he might be a father. But today he was alone. Nobody was there to weep on his death, his body was lying there as a strange dead- body.In the opposite seat six passengers were traveling. Among them two young hearts, they usually travel in that compartment, were not in the world. They were unaware of the old man’s death, they might be thinking of eternity, eternity of love. A passenger next to the lovers deeply involved in reading a book. It seems that he had to gain little more knowledge before his turn. The things that you have gained in your life may not go with you in to the grave, but knowledge, it will. A passenger on berth was in deep sleep, he did not even know the death of old man under his berth. Sleep is just like death, which helps every one to get out from worries for a little while.

The soul of old man might be laughing at the passengers. “You lively people, you are the unluckiest in the world, because you have life”.

Train reached at the Calicut station. The body was taken out from the compartment, and a doctor who waited there confirmed the death. After the usual formalities, police had taken the lifeless body of that old man to the medical college hospital. Train continued its journey, carrying the unluckiest to reach the destination.